The Digital Reader

by John Miedema

reposted with permission of the author

It sounds revolutionary to “seize the means of publication” but it is no small undertaking.

A few weeks back I dashed off a post introducing a series on epublishing. I had hacked together an experimental epub in minutes. I’ve been playing with epub files since. I found three javascript files that allow readers to view my epub file on the web (work in Firefox not IE). Quick to start, these techie tricks are just toes in the water, a peek inside the Pandora’s box of DIY epublishing. I have to keep the lid on at this point, so I will conclude this brief series with a list of some of the many questions that came up for me.

There were a few new technical questions.

• XHTML document semantics. What’s this all about? I’m not even getting page breaks right.
• Epub text-to-speech. Seems to work better with text files than XHTML. What does it take to make this work?
• What is the easiest way to draft content so that it easily converts to XHTML. Should I be thinking about building the software for this?

The technical stuff is fun and all, but it is the smaller part of epublishing.

• How does the cloud help with editing? Bite-Size Edits is a neat experiment. Perhaps writers should hire other writers as editors.
• What about authority? Being writer and publisher weakens the perception of credibility. Perhaps writers can hire well-known writers as editors.
• What about publicity? Social media, I know. Lots of work. Ebooks can be a form of publicity for the sale of print books; see further discussion below.

I started thinking about the relationship between ebook formats and their content. These are things an epublisher would need to think about.

• Is my experimental recipe book really suited to an ereader? I converted to mobi format for my Kindle. It was nice to have a portable recipe book, but it was harder to cook from the small screen. Many recipe books are larger than your average book size.
• Are ebooks trending toward shorter books?

I think some people read full ebooks online, and probably more on ereaders, but many people still prefer reading print books. Often, an ebook is just publicity for the sale of print books.

• Unfortunately, most bookstores and libraries do not stock self-published books. What to do?
• Print-on-demand publishers are an option, but the price per book is often quite high. Shipping is a real issue. If there was a print-on-demand shop in each town, readers could purchase online then pick up their book at their local PoD shop, no shipping costs. Eh?

Many people are struggling with these questions. I hope to return to them at a later point.